The Danger Of Process-Free Foreign Policy

The disturbing parallels between Donald Trump's policy toward Iran and the
run-up to the disastrous U.S. offensive war against Iraq keep piling up. There
is a drumbeat of belligerent rhetoric, with no limit to what the targeted
country gets accused of doing. There is a highly selective, tendentious public
use of intelligence, including presentations either to the United Nations orfrom
an ambassador to the United Nations. There are even some of the same people,
including John Bolton, who still says that the Iraq War was a good thing, who
has made no secret of welcoming a war with Iran, and who today is Trump's
national security advisor.

Mark Landler's reportinginThe
New York Timesabout the run-up to Trump's reneging on the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement that restricts Iran's
nuclear program, points to a less obvious but no less important parallel. Bolton
did not convene any National Security Council meeting to discuss the likely
consequences of violating the JCPOA and whether doing so would be a good idea.
This recalls one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Bush administration's
invasion of Iraq: there was no policy process leading to the decision to launch
that war. There was no options paper, no debate in the Situation Room, and no
other opportunity for members of the administration to discuss whether starting
that war was a good idea. The question simply wasn't on any meeting's agenda.

Of course, chaos in Donald Trump's White House and the impulsive and personal
nature of much of his decision-making are hardly news. But the effort to wreck
the JCPOA has not been a passing impulse. Trump has long ranted about the
accord, and there was ample opportunity to have a sober in-house discussion of
the subject if he had wanted one. As with the Iraq War, the creation and timing
of a crisis were all the White House's own doing.

Much commentary about the Trump administration's policies has focused on who's
in and who's out in senior positions. The unusually high personnel turbulence in
this administration has naturally made that a major topic. But process can
matter as much as personalities. Consider the situation of Secretary of Defense
James Mattis, who is being looked to more than ever as the remaining adult in
the room and who, despite his own emotional hang-ups regarding Iran, reportedly
favored adhering to the JCPOA. Mattis's problem was not just that he may have
been outnumbered on that issue among those who somehow got the president's ear.
The problem was that there was no forum in which he and others in the
administration could formally and explicitly raise and discuss all the reasons
that trashing the JCPOA would be a mistake.

Most major foreign policy decisions in most administrations do have a full
policy process, which entails debate and discussion at several levels and
examines the pros and cons of all relevant policy options. Cumbersome though it
may be at times, such a process is the best way to confront myths and
misadventure with facts and insight. Not all bad policy impulses get stopped,
but there is much more chance of stopping them with a thorough policy process
than without one.

The facts and insight often are readily available within the executive branch.
Consider some of the insights relevant to the Iraq War that were available
within the Bush administration. There was, for example, Army Chief of Staff
General Eric Shinseki, who before the war estimated that several hundred
thousand troops would be needed for success in Iraq, a number far higher than
what promoters of the war were advertising. There was economic policy advisor
Lawrence Lindsay, who estimated the cost of the coming war would be $100-200
billion-which turned out to be a gross underestimate, but again was higher than
what the war promoters wanted people to believe. And there was the U.S.
intelligence community, which, as
was revealed only later, foresaw before the war most of the costly and
bloody mess in Iraq that would ensue once Saddam Hussein was toppled. Shinseki
and Lindsay were purged, and the intelligence community was ignored. If there
instead had been a policy process in which they and others could have weighed in
on the question of whether to launch the invasion, the neocon mythology about a
wonderful war would have had a harder time withstanding scrutiny.

The danger that Bolton represents goes beyond his warmongering views and extends
to his control of policy processes, and with it his ability to curtail or
prevent such processes. If government is working properly, one of the most
important functions of the national security advisor is to ensure that major
foreign policy issues are thoroughly considered before they reach the president
for decision, and that the president is provided in an orderly way with all
relevant options and insights. Not performing this function regarding Iraq was
probably the biggest failure of Condoleezza Rice when she was in the job, before
she went on to have a better performance as secretary of state. The nation
appears to be in for more misadventures in foreign relations not only because of
the impulsiveness and chaotic thinking of the man at the top but also because
the policy-making machinery that would otherwise check such tendencies is not
being allowed to operate.

About the author:
Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security
Studies of Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center
for Security Policy. He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S.
intelligence community. His senior positions included National Intelligence
Officer for the Near East and South Asia, Deputy Chief of the DCI
Counterterrorist Center, and Executive Assistant to the Director of Central
Intelligence. He is a Vietnam War veteran and a retired officer in the U.S. Army
Reserve. Dr. Pillar's degrees are from Dartmouth College, Oxford University, and
Princeton University. His books include Negotiating Peace (1983), Terrorism and
U.S. Foreign Policy (2001), Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy (2011), and Why
America Misunderstands the World (2016).